Judging a Darcy is like judging a fruit cake. He has to be easy on the eye, crusty on the outside, soft in the middle, extraordinarily rich, and not particularly fond of dancing. OK, the simile doesn’t quite stretch but you get the idea.

Here are the nominations:

William Darcy from Bride and Prejudice (2003) – Martin Henderson

William Darcy played by Martin Henderson

Bio: An American hotelier who arrives in India harboring stereotypes of the local culture, akin to Jane Austen’s Darcy’s preconceptions about life outside elite society.
Positives: Classic Hollywood good looks.
Negatives: Perhaps a little too “new-money” for Darcy. The real Darcy wasn’t merely wealthy, of course, and as a gentleman wasn’t one for holding down a job either, whereas this chap is never off his laptop.

Will Darcy from Pride and Prejudice: A Latter Day Comedy (2003) – Orlando Seal

Will Darcy played by Orlando Seal

Bio: A British publisher who receives a manuscript from a certain Elizabeth Bennet, he is initially contemptuous of Miss Bennet’s social circle, before inevitably love begins to blossom.
Positives: His Englishness definitely helps him to appear arrogant and superior at the beginning (I can say this, I’m English. Americans, please don’t leave comments agreeing with me!”)
Negatives: He featured in an episode of the comedy series ‘The IT Crowd,’ in which his name was Peter File. See the YouTube clip below. It’s just impossible to take him seriously after this. In Pride and Prejudice; A Latter Day Comedy, he also has the misfortune to be in a pretty bad film, which doesn’t help matters.

Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones Diary (2001) – Colin Firth

Mark Darcy played by Colin Firth

Bio: Mark Darcy is a stuffy, yet bizarrely well-connected human rights lawyer, who bumps into Bridget at a new year party and eventually becomes a rival of Daniel Cleaver, Bridget’s boss, for her affections.
Positives: He has a natural advantage of course, being for many people the “real” Darcy due to his fabulous performance in the BBC’s 1995 series. His turn in Bridget Jones, in which his head appears to be a perfectly good shape (regardless of Miss Amanda Price’s allegations) is very different of course, but still very Darcy.
Negatives: He is, of course, as socially awkward as Jane Austen’s Fitzwilliam Darcy but lacks the sheltered, aristocratic upbringing in comparison with Bridget. In fact, everyone in the movie is more or less equally posh.

Fitzwilliam Darcy in Lost in Austen (2008) – Elliot Cowan

Elliot Cowan as Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy

Bio: Cowan plays the ‘real’ Darcy from the book, of course, but his life is knocked off course by the arrival of Miss Amanda Price from modern-day London. Amanda seeks to bring Elizabeth and Darcy together, yet slowly the two become drawn to one another instead.
Positives: Cowan is suitably tall, handsome and yet superficially ‘toxic,’ then turns on the charm rather delightfully as the series progresses.
Negatives: Perhaps a little angrier and pricklier than Darcy as portrayed in the book and the major adaptations. Not just cold or insensitive at the beginning, this Darcy is baldly unpleasant.

My Two Cents

My winner has to be Elliot Cowan from Lost in Austen. He takes Darcy to the extremes of insufferability and affability, and somehow binds it all together into one consistent character. He is handsome, of course, but not in a pretty-boy way, and has great chemistry with Miss Amanda Price.

What do you think? Aside from the Darcys of the major, straight adaptations, who is the best of the rest?

Refusing to conga is certainly a lesser crime than refusing to dance altogether, so perhaps Elizabeth should have been more understanding of the gentleman’s reluctance, and suggested a freestyle-disco dance-off instead? 196 years after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, the riddle of Mr Darcy’s supposed ‘inconsistency’ has been solved! A gentlemen simply does not conga.

Did you enjoy the clip? It made me chuckle, and am I alone in thinking that Robert Webb could actually make a half-decent Darcy…?

Jane Austen wrote nothing about the hair color of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice (although she does have dark eyes), and was similarly silent about Darcy’s, Jane’s and Bingley’s barnetts, so where does this certainty come from?

A decidedly dark Elizabeth Bennet

Casting directors have seen it differently in the past. In the 1940 adaptation, Greer Garson’s Elizabeth has blonde hair, while Jane Bennet (Maureen O’ Sullivan) is a brunette. Also, in the 1980 series, Elizabeth Garvie has light brown hair and, again Jane’s (Sabina Franklin) hair is dark. However, from the 1995 BBC production the hair color has been fixed, as is evident in the 2005 movie and in the TV spin-off Lost in Austen.

Hair color is of course richly symbolic within our culture; blonde shades, like the color white, signify sexual and moral purity. Jane Bennet, for this reason, could never join the Pink Ladies. Also, blondeness – unfortunately for some (including me!) – still hasn’t lost its association with dumbness in our culture. Perhaps binding these together is our association of blondeness with childhood, puberty being the time when hair thickens and becomes darker.

Three Blonde Moments - A most definitely blonde Jane Bennet

Dark hair and features are of course more readily identified with moodiness, mystery and danger. It’s obvious, therefore, why it suits Elizabeth and Darcy’s fiery courtship. Perhaps it’s also considered more masculine. Andrew Davies did describe Elizabeth as something of a tomboy, because of her love of country walks, her very ‘unladylike’ habit of arguing with her superiors, and her willingness to get muddy. He said he thought it might be Jane Austen’s code for saying Elizabeth had lots of sexual energy (there he goes again!)

Tall, dark and handsome Mr Darcy

Dark hair is also symbolic of the generally more complex world of the adult. Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship is contradictory and complicated from the start. They both struggle to contain their emotions. Bingley and Jane’s relationship is far simpler. Theirs is such an innocent courtship that it’s hard to see it as adult at all. Bingley is indecisive and Jane is shy. Both are, of course, childlike traits.

The blonde and boyish Mr Bingley

In fact, it doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to see the relationships of Elizabeth and Jane, and Darcy and Bingley, as both containing Parent-Child elements. Elizabeth is both awed and saddened by the naivety of Jane’s worldview. She is like a parent with no way to protect her daughter from the cruelty of the adult world. Likewise, it’s only when Darcy ‘pretty much’ gives his permission for Bingley to marry Jane, that the former finally proposes. His words, therefore, must have carried greater authority than those of a typical friend. Moreover, despite trespassing on his younger friend’s hospitality at Netherfield, he speaks to Bingley with an abruptness that few friends would tolerate.

I’m sure there could be other reasons for the automatic way in which most of us associate Elizabeth and Darcy with dark hair and Jane and Bingley with blondeness, but these are what occurred to me. Did I miss any other hints in the book as to their appearance, or have we just filled in the gaps with our own cultural associations?

Lizzy

Getting this thoroughly unpleasant, early Darcy right is a major challenge for dramatizers. We have an entire novel to get used to his transformation, but making it plausible over a movie or TV series is a different matter. We have to dislike him, but not so much that we put down the book, leave the cinema or don’t bother to tune in the following week. Here is how Darcy’s offish exterior was treated in the 2005 movie and 1995 series:

Colin Firth (1995)

Colin Firth explains his character’s behaviour as follows:

I agree to go to this party with my friend Bingley. He encourages me: ‘Come on, it’ll be a great party with lots of women.’ I arrive. I’m terribly shy – terribly uneasy in social situations anyway. This is not a place I’d normally go to, and I don’t know how to talk to these people. So I protect myself underneath a veneer of snobbishness and rejection. Bingley immediately engages with the most attractive girl in the room, and this makes me even less secure.

As Firth explains, Darcy was, by the terms of the day, Bingley’s superior. Therefore, having his friend suggest that the he make do with the plainer sister would have compounded Darcy’s foul mood.

Matthew Macfadyen (2005)

Director Joe Wright’s explanation of Lizzy and Darcy’s early relationship is a little simpler:

In the beginning, Darcy can’t deal with the fact that he fancies Lizzy. They are like children in the playground – in the way that kids pull hair because they don’t know how to express their feelings. He needs her to tease him and to be able to lighten up with her.

In Matthew Macfadyen’s own take on the early Darcy, he mentions the proposal scene, set of course in the pouring rain in the 2005 film:

He is a serious young man, with huge responsibilities for his estate, and he has never met a young woman like her. When he proposes to her, first explaining how unsuitable a match she is, he makes that explanation out of integrity, not arrogance.

It’s interesting that in each of these explanations, there is an attempt to justify (or at least rationalize) his behavior, to link the early Darcy to the gentlemen that Lizzy bumps into at Pemberley. By contrast, Jane Austen was content to paint a pretty simple picture of his character after the ball scene:

[Mr Darcy's] manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

So this is how Darcy’s apparent inconsistency has been explained by dramatizers. Please add your thoughts below!

Wickham asked a high price to marry Lydia

Here are some thoughts, based on 1997 figures from critic Edward Copeland, about the sums that were thrown at Mr Wickham at various points in Pride and Prejudice. Copeland estimates that a pound in Pride and Prejudice was equivalent to about 80 US dollars today. This gives quite an insight into the staggering sums that were involved in Darcy’s fattening of Wickham’s wallet.

Wickham inherited 1,000 pounds from Fitzwilliam Darcy’s father, which would have been about 80,000 dollars. After abandoning his plan to join the clergy, Wickham decided to take up a career in law. He therefore received another 3,000 pounds from Mr Darcy to pursue his studies – a whopping 240,000 dollars! After three years, Wickham was no closer to the legal profession, and so approached Darcy for another cash handout.

Mr Darcy refused, presumably on the grounds that 320,000 dollars should have gotten Wickham a little further in life. Mr Wickham then attempted to elope with Georgiana Darcy in the hope of securing her fortune of 30,000 Pride-and-Prejudice-pounds. This would be around 2.4 million dollars today! In this scheme, he was fortunately unsuccessful.

When Lydia and Wickham eloped to London, Wickham stood to inherit her paltry sum of 40 pounds a year, which is just 3,200 dollars (based on the interest from her 80,000 inheritance, which would have been held in a government bond.) Of course, this is why he had no intention of marrying Lydia – until Darcy arrived and offered him more money.

At this point, Darcy gave Wickham 1,000 Pride-and-Prejudice-pounds – around 80,000 dollars – to settle his debts. He bought Wickham’s commission at a further 450 pounds, or 36,000 dollars. Mr Bennet believes that Wickham must have demanded no less than 10,000 pounds to marry his youngest daughter, so in total Wickham probably received the equivalent of 800,000 dollars as a wedding gift!

Altogether then, Wickham managed to scrounge the equivalent of over one million dollars from Mr. Darcy during the course of Pride and Prejudice. At the end of the novel, Jane Austen also mentions that Lizzy continued to send George and Lydia Wickham money, saving it through ‘economy in her own private expenses.’ The Wickhams were, it seems, never able to live according to their means:

It had always been evident to [Elizabeth] that such an income as theirs, under the direction of two persons so extravagant in their wants, and heedless of the future, must be very insufficient to their support; and whenever they changed their quarters, either Jane or [Elizabeth] were sure of being applied to for some little assistance towards discharging their bills.

The modern equivalents only provide a rough sketch of course and other estimates have been made. Copeland believes his own figures may even be conservative, and will be especially so since 12 years have passed since his analysis. In any case, it certainly heightens the drama of the story to have a rough idea of how much money was involved.

The famous ‘Rain Scene’ from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie is where Matthew Macfadyen’s dripping-wet Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the first time. The ‘Lake Scene’ from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice 1995 is the moment after Colin Firth’s Darcy has taken a swim in his lake at Pemberley, and is surprised to bump into Elizabeth. Neither scene has much in common with the book, but both have – for obvious reasons – been generously forgiven for their inauthenticity!

As Lost in Austen’s Amanda Price would put it, which scene ‘floats your boat’? Here are video clips of each scene for you to ponder. We’ve shown them both before at My Pride and Prejudice but never on the same page, for fear of causing over-excitement. Please take a look and cast your vote by leaving a comment!

Pride and Prejudice 2005 – The Rain Scene

The Lake Scene in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice 1995

Indeed, the only other rain mentioned in Pride and Prejudice is that which prevents the Bennet girls from walking to Meryton for several days. This would have left the sisters in a ‘most pitiable state’ had they not the Netherfield ball to look forward to. That’s all we’re given, however, and why not? In real life, people who drone on about the weather and the chances of rain are considered insufferably dull, so why should novelists waste their words on such trivial matters?

These days we all seem to agree, however, that a drenched Mr. Darcy is sexier than a dry one, so something must be done. In the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptation, screenwriter Andrew Davies chucked Mr. Darcy into a lake. In the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie, director Joe Wright opened the heavens on the poor fellow as he proposed to Elizabeth. In Lost in Austen, Amanda Price had a strangely ‘post-modern moment’ when she has her Darcy climb into a fountain.

Here, then, is the famous rain scene from Pride and Prejudice 2005.

Your drenched friend,
Lizzy

It’s important to note that Darcy’s transformation is only abrupt in the sense that we don’t see it taking place gradually. It does occur over many months, but Jane Austen famously refused to write scenes involving men by themselves, or men in purely male company. The precise details of the change in Darcy are not documented minutely – indeed Darcy himself is unable to tell Elizabeth when he first fell for her (BBC Pride and Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies has other ideas!) – but this doesn’t mean it happened quickly or arbitrarily. It’s just that we were following Elizabeth, so didn’t get to see it taking place.

Also, while Mr Darcy is unarguably altered morally by his relationship with Elizabeth, we do not see him return to a situation like the Meryton town ball to see the change in his social character. When he returns with Bingley to Netherfield he is once again cold and difficult to read, so he hasn’t suddenly developed an ability to recommend himself to those outside his usual social circle. (Admittedly he has to listen to Mrs. Bennet’s thinly-veiled insults.) The easy manner he has with the Gardiners is displayed, of course, from the comfort of Pemberley, his own estate. In other words, some of the change in Darcy is in fact a change in the context in which he is seen by Elizabeth. The transformation is not, I think, as abrupt and extreme as critics have argued.

Nevertheless, actors playing Darcy have had to display both sides of his character while retaining Mr Darcy’s basic believability. In the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice series, David Rintoul’s Darcy never completely sheds his aloofness. When he greets the Gardiners at Pemberley he is friendly but retains his seriousness and something of his offish-manner. His love for Elizabeth has of course transformed him, but he remains the stiff English gentleman, rather than suddenly inhabiting the body of an overly tactile Californian therapist.

The BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice series approaches Darcy in a more radical manner. Through Colin Firth’s characterization we are shown his transformation. Andrew Davies said that, in Jane Austen’s novel, we never find out much about the men, and he wanted to rectify this by exploring the male characters, most obviously Mr Darcy. Darcy’s emotional struggle is actualized physically, rather than through dialog (except for the iconic ‘I shall conquer this. I shall!’ after his fencing session.) His change isn’t minimized in the name of believability, but presented starkly and explicitly, as painful and violent.

The 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie is in a sense the opposite of the 1980 TV series. Matthew Macfadyen’s Darcy, from the first scene, appears uncomfortable and rather vulnerable. His co-star Keira Knightley said ‘on the page, Darcy reads as being very cold, but Matthew is so vulnerable through his big manliness that he gives Darcy extra qualities.’ Socially awkward and snappy with Bingley at the town ball, rather than obviously superior and cold, it is obvious from the beginning that we are not seeing the gentleman at his best. Condensing Pride and Prejudice into a single movie of course requires compromises, and the choice here appears to have been to present Darcy as a more-than-meets-the-eye character from the start.

This is, in any case, how these matters appear to me. All dispositions tend to a particular evil and mine – I confess – is to give my opinion a little too decidedly at times. Hearing others analyze Darcy is, to many, like listening to someone reviewing your kids and them giving them a score, so feel free to disagree most ardently with my account!

Lovers of the 2005 movie, or at least its leads Matthew Macfayden as Mr Darcy and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth, can get wallpapers and screensavers from the official Pride and Prejudice movie homepage. The site is a little awkward to navigate and seems to cause problems in Safari, but if it opens properly, you can then run your mouse around the bottom-right corner. The word DOWNLOADS will appear, which you have to click in order to see a menu of delightful Pride and Prejudice screen savers and wallpapers. You can also find buddy icons and printable stationary designs to help you make an art of procrastination.

Your procrastinating friend,

Lizzy